Good and bad, but mostly good.

So I'm going home over the Easter vacation for my sister's wedding shower. Due to some difficulties in scheduling, it turned out that the best option would be for me to stay a few extra days so that we could have one extra weekend day to hold the shower. Every other weekend day didn't work: important people were unavailable, or it fell on Easter, so this was the only way to make everyone happy.

The bad thing about staying a few extra days: in Oxford, if you live in a college, you are most often asked to move your room over the break, to make room for conference guests. By "move rooms" I mean "pack up EVERYTHING in your room, including the pictures on the walls." As I am in one of the nicer rooms, I am most definitely asked to move.

The bad thing about moving: If you move out of your room over the break, you have to be available to move back by the first day of term - Sunday, April 13. Even if I did make it back on Sunday, April 13, there was no way I would be in any shape to move boxes after having just traveled 22 hours. We have very limited locker/storage space in college, so it's not like I can just leave them somewhere else.

So, all this was seriously stressing me out. I asked a few friends if they could take stuff for me, to which they graciously agreed, but I realized that even that would be tough as I would have to make arrangements with each one of them to pick up my stuff once I got back. So...

I found a local storage place where I can store my stuff for five weeks for about $30 a week. The price was well worth it to keep my sanity intact. I am the kind of person who is affected physically by stress, so the thought of not having to get sick over it is quite lovely.

Then things started to get even better.

As I mentioned previously, I'm planning on going to San Francisco over the break to see my friend Chrissie. My dad has a ton of frequent flyer miles on US Airways, so he said I could use them for the trip. While I was searching for reward mile flights, I decided on a whim to see if I could use the miles towards London-Heathrow. It turns out that I can, and it doesn't even use that many more miles! (It would have taken 37,500 miles to do BDL-SFO, but 50,000 to do BDL-LHR. My dad has about 85,000 miles, so it wouldn't have used up the whole thing.) Since it was only $350-$450 to fly to San Fran and $800-$1000 to fly to London, I decided it would be a much better deal to use the miles to go to London. So, I get to fly back for only $137 - the cost of the fees. Even with the cost of the storage, I'm still saving hugely.

In any case, it turns out that the flights I wanted to San Fran were snapped up pretty quickly, so the next available flights would have cost me 50,000 miles. Since it came down to saving $400 versus saving $900, I figured using the miles towards London was still a better value.

So I'm booking the flight back to the UK on US Airways, and it's at a good time in a non-sucky terminal, which is great. And I bought a ticket to San Fran on Southwest, via Chicago-Midway, for only $370. I used to fly Southwest all the time, so I'm cool with them.

It always turns out that the episodes that lead me to major stressful breakdowns end up working out better than expected. I love it when that happens. :)